While workers are repeatedly told there is no money for living wages, proper health care, school repairs and the like, the net worth of Canada’s richest 87 families, on average, has risen by $806 million in a period of just four years. The average wealth of these 87 families rose from $2.2 billion to nearly $3 billion from 2012 to 2016, Global News reports. Each of these 87 families are, as a result, 4,448 times wealthier than the average Canadian family. All told, the aggregate wealth of this tiny elite is around $259 billion.

This week, we learned that the four members of the Sears board of directors have pocketed a total of $600,000 in salaries and another $600,000 in professional expenses, despite the fact that all stores have been closed since January. You may recall that the company announced on June 22, 2017 that 59 of its Canadian stores would be closed due to restructuring, which led to the loss of 2,900 jobs in a few months. Later that year, on Oct. 13, they made the announcement that they were closing all 130 stores in Canada. According to Radio-Canada, approximately 17,000 employees lost their jobs at Sears.

On Monday July 9th, Greyhound announced that in October of this year, they will be shutting down all routes in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, with the exception of one last route in BC going from Vancouver to Seattle. Ontario bus routes will also be canceled west of Sudbury. These cuts have been causing a great deal of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Northwestern rural communities in general, as many people rely on these buses to reach urban areas.

In this talk from the 2018 IMT World Congress, Alan Woods (editor of In Defence of Marxism) discusses the perspectives for world revolution. Alan emphasises the volatility and turbulence seen on a world scale, with the situation – and consciousness – changing in a matter of days on the basis of events.

The trade war between the United States and Canada has begun. On July 1, the tariffs that Donald Trump announced against steel and aluminum came into effect. In response, the Canadian government has put counter tariffs in place. The rise in protectionism threatens to drag the already fragile world economy into a deep slump. In this war in which big capitalist powers fight over who has the largest piece of the pie, the workers will be the first victims.

On Thursday the deadline passed for an agreement between Trump and Canada, Japan, Mexico and the EU on trade. Failure to reach an agreement meant that the steel and aluminium tariffs threatened by Trump came into force. With this, Trump has begun the process of unravelling globalisation. On Saturday, the G-7 finance ministers met and the 6 non-US ministers came together against the US, expressing their “unanimous concern and disappointment” over the US decision.

As of midnight on May 31, the Trump administration has delivered on its threats and imposed tariffs on imports of Canadian steel and aluminum. The tariffs amount to 25 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively. Mexico and Europe have also been targeted.

On May 23, more than 70 students and workers gathered at Ryerson University for Fightback’s event on the Sexual Revolution in the Soviet Union. Presenting on the topic was Fred Weston, editor of the In Defense of Marxism website and author of a recent series of articles on sexuality in the USSR. He explained that to learn the real lessons for the struggle against oppression today, we have to start with an honest appraisal of what the Russian Revolution was able to achieve in the early stages of the revolution, and why and how these achievements came to be reversed under Stalinism, placing all of these developments in their historical context.

At 1:30 in the afternoon of Monday, April 23, a man deliberately drove a rental van into pedestrians in the Yonge and Finch area of Toronto. At the time of writing 10 people are dead, while 15 are in hospital, some in serious condition. The injured and dead are men, women, possibly children, out walking in what is known as Toronto’s “north downtown”, a busy retail area. How can we understand such violence and hate?

In March 1934 Stalin re-criminalised homosexuality across the whole of the Soviet Union. Henceforth anyone involved in homosexual acts could be sent to prison for three to five years. In the early years of the Russian Revolution, however, homosexuality had been legalised – but this is something you will find little mention of in the literature produced by the official Communist Parties after 1934. Today’s Stalinists, who model themselves on Stalin’s regime, have a lot of explaining to do.